What Is GEO and How to Get AI Assistants to Find You

More and more people ask an AI assistant directly instead of searching on Google: “who can maintain my business website?”, “how much does an online shop cost?”. The assistant answers with a summary and, sometimes, with links to the websites it used as sources. Getting yours to be one of them is what’s called GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).

In short: GEO isn’t magic or a new trick. AI assistants that search the web (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude or Google’s AI summaries) need to be able to crawl your website, understand who you are and find clear, reliable answers. Almost everything that works is good SEO done carefully.

SEO and GEO: how they’re alike and how they differ

SEO aims to get your website into a search engine’s results. GEO aims to get an AI assistant to use it as a source and cite it in its answer. The foundation is the same: a website that can be crawled, loads quickly and has useful content. The difference is the format of the answer: the assistant doesn’t show ten links, but a text that summarises several sources. If your website explains something better than the others, you have a better chance of being cited.

What the AI companies themselves say

The most useful thing is to go to the source: each company’s official documentation.

Google explains that to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode there are no additional requirements or special optimisations: the page has to be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet in regular search.
OpenAI uses a crawler called OAI-SearchBot for its search. According to its documentation on bots, sites that block it are not shown in ChatGPT search answers. GPTBot is a different crawler, the one it uses to train models.
Anthropic (Claude) distinguishes between ClaudeBot (training), Claude-User (when a user asks it to read a page) and Claude-SearchBot. Its help centre warns that blocking Claude-SearchBot may reduce your site’s visibility in its results.
Perplexity uses PerplexityBot to surface and link websites in its results, and doesn’t use it to train AI models.
Bing has an AI performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools that shows when Microsoft Copilot, Bing’s AI summaries and some partner integrations cite your website.

What you can do on your website

1. Let AI search crawlers in

Check your robots.txt and the settings of your CDN or security plugin. You can block training crawlers if you don’t want your content used to train models, but if you block the search ones (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot), you make it hard for those assistants to cite you. For example, according to OpenAI, sites that block OAI-SearchBot are not shown in ChatGPT search answers.

2. Make it clear who you are

An AI assistant has to be able to answer without hesitation “what is this business, what does it do and where is it”. It helps to have:

An “About us” or “About me” page with real names.
The same details (name, city, contact) on your website, your Google Business Profile and your social profiles.
Structured data (schema.org) describing your business, your services and your prices.

To keep those details consistent everywhere, our local SEO guide will help.

3. Answer your customers’ questions, starting with the answer

AI assistants extract specific paragraphs. If someone asks how much your service costs and your website says so in the first sentence of a section, it’s easy to cite. If they have to read three paragraphs of introduction, it isn’t. Well-written FAQs work very well for this.

4. Back up your claims with sources

An academic study on GEO (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024) compared different ways of rewriting content. Citing sources, adding quotations and including statistics improved how much websites showed up in the answers of generative engines: by around 30-40% in the study’s visibility metric. Stuffing the text with keywords didn’t work. It’s a lab experiment, but it points in the same direction as good journalism: concrete data with a clear origin.

5. Take care of the technical SEO basics

A slow website, one with errors or one that relies on JavaScript to show its content makes life hard for any crawler. Having the important text in the HTML, a website that loads quickly (we explain how in our Core Web Vitals guide) and no broken links is still essential.

What you don’t need

Plenty of GEO “tricks” are doing the rounds. One of the most repeated is the llms.txt file. Google says explicitly that you don’t need to create special files for AI, and neither OpenAI nor Anthropic asks for it in their documentation on crawlers. It does no harm, but it isn’t what will make you appear.

How to measure it

Google Search Console counts clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode within the Performance report, under the “Web” search type, according to Google’s documentation.
Search Console also has, since 31 August 2026, a generative AI performance report that shows how many times your website appears in those features, with impressions by page, country and device.
Bing Webmaster Tools shows, in its AI performance report, citations in Copilot, in Bing’s AI summaries and in some partner integrations.
Your analytics: ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to its links, according to OpenAI’s FAQ for publishers, so you can see how many visits come from there.

SEO, GEO and performance

SEO and GEO audit with fixes: we get your website ready to be found by Google and AI assistants.